


Loneliness, Loneliness (It's Such a Waste of Time)

by millepertuis



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Awkward Bed Sharing, Babysitter Steve Harrington, Canonical Character Death, Developing Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Monster Hunting as a Bonding Exercise, Multi, POV Alternating, Post-Season/Series 01, Post-Season/Series 02, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:06:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millepertuis/pseuds/millepertuis
Summary: Steve looked back at the house. The lights were flickering again. The monster was coming back, Nancy had said. Leave, Nancy had said. Nancy had a gun, and Jonathan that nail bat. They had it covered. They didn’t want Steve around.What the fuck are you doing?he thought, and then the lights went out and he went back.





	Loneliness, Loneliness (It's Such a Waste of Time)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hyperical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyperical/gifts).



> title from Solomon Burke’s song _Cry to Me_
> 
> additional warnings for: some mostly hinted at internalized homophobia, trauma as a result of canonical events
> 
> happy yuletide!

 

 

BEFORE

 

Steve looked back at the house. The lights were flickering again. The monster was coming back, Nancy had said. Leave, Nancy had said. Nancy had a gun, and Jonathan that nail bat. They had it covered. They didn’t want Steve around.

 _What the fuck are you doing?_ he thought, and then the lights went out and he went back.

The rest of it was a blur. Jonathan was sprawled out on the floor when he ran back into the house. For a second Steve thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t.

The monster was going after Nancy, and the bullets weren’t stopping it any.

Steve half tripped over something going to her, scraping his palms on the floor to stop his fall. Jonathan, struggling to get back up, kicked the nail bat over to him, and Steve picked it up and picked himself up. Nancy had run out of bullets. Steve threw himself at the monster and just went at it.

It wasn’t going to kill it. The bullets hadn’t done the job, and the bat was only just holding it back. Steve didn’t think about it, and kept swinging. Nancy and Jonathan would do something, or the monster would eat him.

The monster didn’t eat him. The monster stepped back, and back, and into a trap. Nancy’s voice rang out clear and sharp. “Now,” she was saying, and Jonathan set the monster on fire, and just like that it was all over. Steve didn’t let go of the bat for hours, not until Hopper stopped by the house to tell Jonathan they had his brother at the hospital and the monster was gone for good, and even then Steve kept the bat next to him all the way to the hospital, and only left it behind because they wouldn’t have let him in with it, but it was over.

 

 

 

Mrs. Byers was the one who let him into the house, about a week later. It was unbearably awkward, what with how Steve had been playing bully to her son, and had spewed a bunch of shit about her and her family because he had wanted—he had wanted—

It was just unbearably awkward.

“He’s in his room,” she told him. She patted his shoulder and left him to it.

Steve knew the way. He walked past the burn marks, trying not to breathe through his nose in case the smell of charred monster still lingered, and knocked on Jonathan’s door.

“Yeah?” Jonathan called, which Steve took as permission to let himself him.

Jonathan was sat on the floor, leaning back against his bed, a bunch of notes and schoolbooks spread out around him. Schoolwork waited for no man, and for no supernatural abduction of family members either, Steve supposed. He must have a lot of material to go through: Jonathan hadn’t come back to school in the week since Will had been found. Nancy hadn’t either.

Steve hadn’t missed a day, though he could have used the fight with Jonathan as an excuse to skip a few. Better to be at school than alone at home with his thoughts, he had figured. Plus, he had wanted to be there whenever Nancy and Jonathan came back. He had ached to see them, to talk to them.

Jonathan was staring at him.

Steve cleared his throat. “I’m glad your brother’s alright,” he said.

Jonathan blinked, then looked down at his notes. “Thanks,” he said, gruffly. After a minute: “Was that why you came by?”

“Um, no. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Jonathan asked, not looking at him.

Steve rubbed at the back of his neck. “For everything I said the other day, and for the way I’ve been acting in general. I’m sorry.”

“Ah,” Jonathan said. He still had his head down, and Steve couldn’t see his face. He couldn’t tell what Jonathan was feeling, couldn’t tell if he was feeling anything at all. He felt that old itch under his skin, the one that had pushed him to purposefully bump into Jonathan like a complete dick when he had walked past him at school. He viciously pushed it down. He felt so sick of himself.

“Sorry for beating you up, then, I guess,” Jonathan said, making brief eye contact before looking down again.

Steve’s face still felt sore where Jonathan had hit him. He wondered if Jonathan could still feel Steve’s hands on him, too.

“Was that all?”

Steve didn’t really know how to go about bonding with someone—at least, not someone who hated his guts because Steve had been a total dick to him.  They had grown up in the same place, Jonathan always, it seemed, in Steve’s periphery, but they didn’t have a whole lot in common. Just monsters and Nancy, really, and Steve had decided to give the whole denial thing a go when it came to monsters.

“Nancy likes you a lot,” he tried, but it was the wrong track. Jonathan’s face shuttered completely.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said coldly, and this time he made a show of opening one of the books and bending over it. The conversation was over.

Another door opened when Steve was in the hallway, and Nancy’s brother came out. He made a face when he saw Steve.

“What are _you_ doing here?” he asked, rude but not, Steve had to admit, undeservedly so.

“Just, talking to Jonathan,” Steve said, awkwardly.

“Whatever,” the kid said. He looked vaguely ill, pale and red-eyed, like he was the one recovering from a supernatural kidnapping. Steve remembered what Nancy and Jonathan had told him while they had waited in this house for something to happen, and then what Nancy had said after everything at the hospital.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your friend,” he said. “It sounds like she was a really brave kid.”

Mike’s face crumpled a little. He breathed loudly through his nose, shook his head. “Whatever,” he said again, and went right back into the room he had come from.

Steve should probably have just stayed home.

Mrs. Byers was taking down the lights in the living room.

“Hey,” he said, stopping on his way out, “do you need help with that?”

“Nah,” she said, “I’m good.”

She had dark circles under her eyes, the same ones Steve recognized from seeing them in the mirror, or from Jonathan’s face and Mike Wheeler’s right before. No one in this house had been getting much sleep since Will Byers had gone missing and monsters had started showing up.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll give you a hand.”

 

 

 

Nancy’s dad had loaned her the car to go pick Mike up from the Byers’ house. He had given her the keys, awkwardly patted her shoulder, and mumbled something about how maybe it was time they went back to school.

Mrs. Byers walked Mike to the car, a bit of paranoia Nancy couldn’t fault her for. They made some small talk. Mrs. Byers went back to the house, Nancy waiting until she was safely inside to start the car and go.

Mike didn’t speak. After a few minutes, she said, as casually as she could, “Do you want me to drop you off at school tomorrow?”

He twisted in his seat to look at her. “I’m not going back to school tomorrow!”

“Mike, come on,” she pleaded with him. He stayed tense and unrelenting for half a minute before yielding all at once.

“I just don’t want to leave Will alone,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “He’s not going back yet.”

“He won’t be alone. He has his mom, and Jonathan. They’re not going to let anything happen to him.” She hesitated. “And you won’t be alone either. Dustin and Lucas have gone back already, haven’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“And I’m going back, too. We have to, eventually, don’t we?”

“I guess so.” He didn’t say anything more until they had gotten home and she had parked the car. “I just. I feel like if I just go back, it’s like—like none of it ever happened. Like none of it meant anything.”

Yesterday, Nancy’s mom had found her frozen before an old photograph of her and Barbara. They must have been about five or six when it was taken. They had gotten into her parents’ room and played dress-up. Karen had scolded them when she’d found them, but then she had fixed their make-up. They still looked silly in the picture. They had been so happy, playing at being grown-ups, without a care in the world. Nancy hadn’t been able to look away.

“Oh, baby,” Karen had said, gently stroking Nancy’s hair. “I’m sure Barbara’s alright. We’re gonna find her, you’ll see.”

Nancy hadn’t said anything at all.

She hugged Mike to her. “ _You_ know it happened,” she said fiercely, “and _I_ know. And all the people who matter know. Alright?”

“Yeah,” he said, muffled, against her shoulder. “Alright.”

 

 

 

School—school was the same. The place was the same. The people were the same. The classes were the same.

But Nancy wasn’t the same, and Barbara wasn’t anything at all.

She caught glimpses of Steve in the hallways. He had come over to her house to apologize in person, actually ringing the bell and trying to make conversation with her parents until she dragged him outside to talk, her father distracted by the television, her mother borderline hostile.

“I’m not saying any of this to try and win you back,” he had rushed to say afterwards, and she believed it, but she hadn’t known what to do with him. She had already forgiven him, or she had forgotten she was angry at him in any case, and there was no space left in her to hurt over him, over what she had felt for him. There was no space left in her for anything at all.

Steve left her alone, though they sat at the same table to eat lunch. They didn’t talk, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It felt like standing back to back with Jonathan had, waiting for the Demogorgon. The whole world hostile, but still some measure of safety.

She eyed Tommy and Carol, who sometimes looked over at them but never came close, and hoped Steve knew she had his back, too.

 

 

 

Jonathan was sorting through some of his pictures when his mom came back from work. He heard her check in on Will. Then she popped in to see him.

“You didn’t have to go buy groceries,” Joyce said.

He shrugged. “It’s alright. We made an excursion of it. I took money from the emergency jar,” he added, though he hadn’t.

“And the stuff in the hallway?”

“I was the one who set it on fire, I figured I should be the one to fix it.”

She came to sit next to him on the bed.

“Sweetheart,” she said, brushing his hair away from his eyes. “You don’t have to carry the whole world on your shoulders.”

 _I learned it from you_ , he thought. She had seemed bigger than life when he was a kid. It had been such a shock to grow taller than she was. To be old enough to realize when she was tired, or sad, or worried about money.

She sighed, and let it go. “You doing okay with school?” she asked instead.

“Yeah. Nancy’s been dropping stuff off for me, or sending it over with Mike. I’m not gonna get behind.”

“She’s a sweet girl.”

Nancy wasn’t sweet. She was kind, sure, but not sweet. She was… She was the kind of girl who would hunt monsters, and plan out how to trap them, and shoot at them until she ran out of bullets. She was stubborn, and clever, and so sharp she would cut you if you weren’t careful.

Joyce watched him sort his pictures into piles. Occasionally she’d take one for a closer look. She asked if she could keep a photograph of her and Will playing in the snow, a few winters back.

“You never let me take pictures of you,” she said reprovingly, sliding the photo into her pocket.

He shrugged. He took pictures to remember something, or to figure something out. He had no use for pictures of himself.

Joyce fished another photo from the box, and tilted it into the light for a better look. “That’s the boy who helped you and Nancy set fire to the Demogorgon, isn’t it?”

Jonathan looked over, resisting the urge to snatch the photograph out of her fingers. It was one of the first pictures Jonathan had taken, after he’d gotten his camera. He had walked around town after school and had snapped photos of everything that looked interesting. Steve had been playing soccer with his friends. Jonathan, gangly and awkward after his first growth spurt, had found something compelling in the way Steve moved, in the way Steve laughed loudly and unselfconsciously.

Jonathan had never wanted to _be_ Steve Harrington. He’d never wanted the popularity or the attention, the athleticism, any of it. It would be easier to explain why he so often found himself staring after Steve if he had ever had.

 

 

 

The three of them ate lunch together the day Jonathan came back. It was about as awkward as Steve had thought it would be. They asked how Jonathan’s brother was doing as they sat down, and didn’t talk about anything but schoolwork for the rest of lunch. Steve’s leg kept bumping into Jonathan’s on accident. Nancy didn’t touch him once but she was sitting so close he couldn’t think about anything else.

Some time the year before, Steve had gone out to eat with Tommy and a few of the guys. Their usual booth at the diner was taken, so Steve had followed his friends to another one in the back, and only realized halfway to it that the teenager in the booth next to theirs was Jonathan, eating there with his mom and his little brother. He had looked up as they started settling in the booth, and for a brief second his eyes met Steve’s. Steve ended up sitting directly behind him, back to back in their separate booths. Tommy threw a fry over the table at some point, and when Steve inched back to avoid it, his shoulder brushed against Jonathan’s. Steve barely dared breathe for the rest of the meal.

This, the three of them, it was good. So Steve and Jonathan had feelings for the same girl. So Steve had been a dick to the both of them and Jonathan had beaten him up. So what. Monster hunting was a bonding experience. They could work things out, the three of them. Nancy had said she forgave him, and Jonathan was willing to talk to him, at least. Nancy wasn’t going to take him back, but they could still be friends, couldn’t they? The three of them might have some way to go, but they could build something solid if they worked at it. They could. They were going to.

 

 

 

They didn't.

 

 

 

Nancy was waiting for him when he got out of his car one morning, early December. She was clutching her books to her chest. A month ago he would have tried to coax them away from her and carry them for her. A month ago he would have wanted to kiss away the little frown lines between her brows, though he might not have been brave enough to do it. There was a little stray dead leaf stuck in her hair, a little piece of autumn.

 _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’ll be better, please take me back_. The words ached to pour out of him, needy and embarrassing, but he swallowed them back easily enough, used to it.

“Hi,” he said, after a while.

“Hi,” she said.

Jonathan had stopped coming to lunch a couple of weeks ago.

 _He wouldn’t have you, then_? Steve thought, but didn’t say. These days, he tried to keep the poison inside, where it only hurt him. He tucked her hair behind her ear, gently brushed his thumb over her cheekbone. She leaned slightly into his hand, her clear eyes obstinate and lovely. He felt like his heart was breaking in two.

 _It’s alright_ , he thought, the first time she kissed him a few days after that. _He wouldn’t have me either._

 

 

 

Nancy practiced her shooting skills twice a month the whole winter, then every weekend come spring. She started dragging Steve along to teach him how to shoot. Just in case. 

She had asked Jonathan to come along when she’d caught him in between classes, but he'd shaken his head and smiled. “You're a better shot than I am, anyway,” he had said.

She aimed at her homemade target and fired the gun without pause until the chamber was empty.

“Alright, then,” Steve said. “Hope it’s not my face you’re picturing there.”

“It’s not your face,” she said, and went to check the target. All bull’s eyes, except for one that had ended up a bit farther off.

She set up some beer and food cans she’d gathered up for Steve, then showed him how to reload the gun and aim. There wasn’t anything obviously wrong with his posture, so she let him go ahead and shoot. It took him a few tries to get each can, but he more or less got the hang of it. They weren’t going to need any precision shooting, but she was going to make him keep working at it anyway. Just in case.

They went to collect everything once they were both done. They didn’t start arguing until halfway through it.

It was the same thing it always was: Steve didn’t want to talk about it, and Nancy couldn’t think about anything else. Especially not today, when they’d had dinner with Barb’s parents the night before, and she still felt raw and ugly inside. She didn’t understand how he could just brush it away like that.

“Don’t you feel _guilty_?” she asked him.

He hesitated. “I—I don’t know. I guess I do.”

“You _guess_? Let me tell you, if you’re not sure, you're not feeling it.”

Maybe he did feel something: he reached his tipping point much earlier than he usually did. “I don’t think about stuff that way, alright? It happened. It just happened, and I can’t do anything about it. If I could, if I could go back and change it, I would. But I can’t, so what’s the point of…” He trailed off, swallowed. “She’s… She’s never gonna grow old, Nance. But you are. You can’t let this eat you away.”

She threw another can into her trash bag and didn’t look at him. She wanted to go reload her gun and empty it again, like every time she fired a bullet she could let go of some of the anger and hurt that were constantly trapped inside her. She wanted to make him go away.

Steve sighed. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry she died. I’m sorry you lost your friend.” She saw him rake his hand over his hair from the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry I invited you over that night and I’m sorry I went up to my room with you and forgot about her.” Softer, he said, “I’m sorry I don’t know how to help you through this.”

She wanted him to say the right words, the magic words, the words that would make everything right again. But those words didn’t exist, or if they did, only Barb could say them. That was the problem.

 

 

 

Steve hadn't left yet. He was standing off alone, away from the people laughing and drinking and dancing outside, the line of his body stiff and lonely.

He turned his head slightly when he heard Jonathan's footsteps. He looked him up and down.

“So you do still live around here,” Steve said, looking away from him. “I wondered.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Steve shrugged. “You haven’t exactly been around, lately.”

“Why? You’ve been looking for me?” Jonathan asked, skeptical.

“Don’t usually have to look.” He raised a bottle of something to his lips and drank.

“What’s going on with you?” Jonathan finally asked, feeling wrong-footed. “Did you and Nancy have a fight?”

“Nancy,” Steve repeated blankly, like he couldn’t quite recognize the name. “I suppose we did, yes. Why did you stop coming to lunch, Jonathan?” he asked abruptly.

Jonathan shoved his hands in his pockets, skin prickly. “What was I going to do? Keep having lunch with the two of you everyday, hang out after school, come along to your dates?”

“Why not? You’re always there anyway, might as well invite you along.”

“You’re drunk,” Jonathan said, disgustedly.

Steve looked out into the street, and Jonathan looked, too. A child in a fairy costume holding a glittery wand in one hand and a bag chockfull of candy in the other. A teenager running after a younger sibling. Someone walking their dog. The normalcy of it all rankled. Halloween didn’t feel the same now that Jonathan had seen real monsters—the ones that ate people and the ones that kept children locked up in labs to experiment on them. _Jonathan_ didn’t feel the same. He didn’t know how he ever could. Didn't Steve and Nancy feel this way, too? Was he the only one still stuck?

He wanted to ask, but he couldn’t get the words out of his mouth.

“Would you make sure Nancy gets home safe?” Steve asked. “I think she’s still in the bathroom.”

“Sure,” Jonathan said.

Steve nodded, and got his car keys out. Jonathan walked to him and held him back by the arm.

“Hey,” he said. “Let me get you home, too.”

Steve looked at him, eyes gleaming strangely. “Trying for a two for two, Byers? No, I can drive. I promise I’m not drunk.”

“Steve, come on,” Jonathan insisted, pleading.

Steve looked away. He dropped his keys back into his pocket. “I’ll beg a ride off those guys,” he said, pointing at the small group piling into a car a few feet away. Jonathan recognized them vaguely from having seen them around Steve. “They’re going my way. Will that do?”

 _No_ , Jonathan wanted to say. He wanted to be the one to take Steve and Nancy home. He wanted to put them into bed and draw the covers over them and close the door behind him knowing bone deep that they were safe.

“Yeah,” he said, and let go of Steve.

 

 

 

Steve dreamed of Jonathan, sometimes. He dreamed of that night with the monster, the blood dripping from Jonathan’s hand, from Nancy’s. He dreamed of all that had happened, and, sometimes worse, of all that could have.

Steve dreamed of Jonathan, sometimes, but they weren’t always nightmares.

There was this one dream: dozing off in the sun during lunch hour, the smell of freshly cut grass in his nose, his head in Nancy’s lap. In the dream Jonathan’s and Nancy’s voices washed over him, and gentle fingers carded through his hair. Sometimes he knew the hand in his hair was Nancy’s.

Sometimes it was Jonathan’s.

 

 

 

 

 

AFTER

 

Mrs. Byers had gotten into a good groove yelling at the kids for the stunt they had pulled. Steve would have enjoyed the set-down with all his heart, except for how a) every sound louder than a whisper was murder on his head, b) Nancy was a very incompetent nurse, and her every effort to fix his face was excruciating c) somewhere in there—probably after he had gotten his brain scrambled—Steve had become genuinely fond of the little ticks, so much so that he derived no satisfaction in seeing them yelled at, and actually found himself defending them on several occasions, which had for only result to d) get him yelled at as well.

Then Hopper came back with that psychic girl—Steve wasn’t too clear on what had happened there, except that apparently she’d spent the last year living with Hopper in the woods—and Mrs. Byers stopped yelling long enough to pat the girl on the head and check her for injuries and psychological trauma, then pushed Hopper into another room and started yelling again, presumably about how keeping a teenage girl locked up in the woods with no company was bad for child development.

By the time they came out again, all the kids except Mike, who had made eyes at Mrs. Byers and slipped into Will’s room before the yelling got started, that little traitor, had banded together and agreed they wouldn’t be separated tonight, and possibly ever, though Dustin agreed they should focus their efforts on the immediate future.

Mrs. Byers and Hopper, somehow not expecting mutiny, told the kids to gather their things, and asked Max where she should be dropped off.

“Oh,” Max said in a small voice, and looked down. “It’s only… My brother is going to be so angry with me…”

They caved immediately.

By the time Steve had recovered enough from Nancy’s attempts at nursing to stand, the yelling had resumed as Mrs. Byers weeded out which of the kids had already shamelessly lied to their parents about their whereabouts, and would their lies hold up until the morning, and didn’t any of them have any shame?

“I’m gonna go home now,” Steve told Nancy, but he had barely gotten his car keys out of his pocket that Mrs. Byers had appeared to pluck them out of his hand.

“I don’t think so, young man,” she said. “You’re in no state to drive, Hop will take you. He’ll have a chat with your parents so they know what to look for with your injuries.”

“Oh, they aren’t gonna be around for the next few days,” Steve said without thinking, which was how he ended up sandwiched between Nancy and Jonathan in Jonathan’s bed.

Steve listened intently to the noises of the house settling down for the night to try and distract himself from the fact that the bed was way too narrow for three people, and he could feel Jonathan’s and Nancy’s every movement—he could feel when they _breathed_. He listened to the sounds of Hopper making up the couch and swearing, to Joyce’s footsteps as she distributed sheets and clothes to sleep in to everyone; he listened as the boys bunking down on old mattresses in Will’s room argued for co-ed sleeping arrangements and were roundly defeated.

“I thought she was dead for a year!” Mike threw as a last-ditch effort.

Hopper snorted. “Nice try, kid.”

“Why do Jonathan and Steve get to have a sleepover with Nancy, then?” Dustin asked, the little snitch.

“Not my problem,” said Hopper.

“They’re not having a sleepover with Nancy,” said Mrs. Byers, but twenty seconds later she was at the door to check.

“Oh,” she said, wringing her hands. “I don’t think…”

“Mom, come on, it’s not like we’re going to have an orgy,” Jonathan said.

“Not with the kids right in the next room,” Steve piped up, and valiantly did not squeal like a little pig when Nancy elbowed him in a sore spot.

Mrs. Byers’ maternal instincts must have sensed something, or maybe Steve _had_ made some small noise, because she asked if he wanted some painkillers. “Or maybe some ice?” she added.

Steve winced. “I wouldn’t… open the fridge, if I were you,” he said, which at least got Mrs. Byers to leave them to it, provided another ten minutes of distraction as the yelling resumed, and handsomely paid back Dustin for his treacherousness.

Mrs. Byers eventually sent Dustin back to Will’s room, and promised that if she saw anyone still up in five minutes—

“—I’m going to stuff them in the fridge next to that thing, and that includes you, Hopper!” she finished on.

There was a flurry of footsteps in every direction, then Mrs. Byers made a last check. She closed the door after she stopped by Jonathan’s room, leaving Steve alone in that bed with everything he didn’t want to think about, and only his aches and all the nightmares he’d ever had about this house as distractions.

He should probably have tried to crawl his way home.

Steve killed about half an hour daydreaming on how he was going to get revenge on every one of those abominable little kids for kidnapping him, and then maybe another picturing the end of the fight with Billy as it had been gleefully described to him on the way back to the Byers’ house—hell on his ego, but deeply satisfying nonetheless. But then he was back to square one, flinching at every noise, hurting everywhere, and hyperaware of the two bodies next to him.

“Can’t sleep?” Jonathan asked at some point, voice interestingly scratchy.

“No,” Steve said.

“No,” Nancy said.

“Me either,” Jonathan said, which seemed to be the extent of his contribution to the conversation he had started.

Oh, what the hell, Steve figured.

“I get really scared at night,” he admitted. He felt Nancy and Jonathan shift slightly on either side of him.

“What do you mean?” Nancy asked.

“I don’t know. I just get scared, ever since last year. Like anything might be waiting for me in the dark. I can’t get out of bed until morning even if I’m really thirsty or need to pee really bad because I’m scared there’s a monster under my bed. It’s pretty embarrassing.”

“It’s not,” Nancy said, and then they both waited for Jonathan to say he didn’t think it was embarrassing either, and maybe add an embarrassing anecdote of his own.

Jonathan, who was obviously a very unfeeling kind of person, only said, “I’ll be right back,” and slid out of bed and then out of the room.

Nancy hooked her fingers around Steve’s thumb and squeezed. Steve wondered if something in her chest had tightened too, to see Jonathan leave.

They waited in silence for him to come back. When he did, he was carrying the baseball bat and a flashlight, a little circle of light paving the way before him.

“What are you doing?” Steve whispered, but he was pretty sure he knew. He just didn’t know how to feel about it.

“All the doors and windows are locked,” Jonathan said as he shut the bedroom door behind him. He went to the small closet he kept his clothes in and opened it. He shone the flashlight into it and examined it thoroughly, even though it was easy to tell at first glance nothing could hide there. “Nothing here,” he said when he was done. He closed the door and walked to the bed. He knelt on the floor, leaning down to look under the bed, carefully directing the flashlight from one side to the other. “Nothing here either,” Jonathan said. After getting back up, he put the nail bat down against the nightstand. “But I’m gonna leave this here, just in case, okay?”

Steve couldn’t speak at all.

He could easily see Jonathan doing this for Will, over and over if needed, and still as kind and patient every time. Had anyone ever done this for Jonathan? Steve couldn't imagine his father had, but surely Mrs. Byers would have.

Would Jonathan have told his mother when he was scared and needed comfort, or would he have kept it to himself, even as a child?

“Do you want to check, too?” Jonathan asked Steve and Nancy, wiggling the flashlight.

“It’s okay,” Nancy answered, taking mercy on Steve. “We trust you.”

“Alright. Okay to turn off the light?”

They both nodded, and Jonathan slipped back into bed and switched the flashlight off.

Nancy was still holding on to Steve’s thumb; Jonathan was lying so close to him they touched from shoulder to knee. Steve had worried it would be awkward, and it was, a bit, but he felt warm, too, and safe, cocooned in between the two of them. It was almost easy to fall asleep, knowing they would both be there in the morning.

 

 

 

“He wouldn’t talk to me about it,” Nancy said abruptly.

They were doing the dishes after lunch. Will, Mike and Eleven had gone back to Will’s room, and his mom was dropping the rest of the kids off. Hopper had gone with them to have a word with Max’s parents. It was only the two of them, and Chester curled up at the door.

Steve had left right after breakfast.

Jonathan rinsed a soapy plate and then handed it to her. “Steve?” he hazarded.

She nodded her head, meticulously drying the dish with the dishcloth. “I knew he wasn’t sleeping well, what with the _giant bags_ under his eyes, but he’d keep pretending everything was fine. He’d fall asleep sometimes when we were studying and he’d start shaking and sweating in his sleep, and still he’d pretend to be fine when I woke him up. We kept fighting about it. Do you have nightmares?” she asked, a bit defiantly, staring straight at him like she was daring him to lie about it.

“Yeah.”

He’d had a lot of nightmares about Will in the past year. How many times had he slipped out of bed in the middle of the night just to go check, just to make sure his brother was really back, was safe and whole and home, only to find their mom already there at the door, trying to tame the same fears?

He had other nightmares, too. He didn’t lack for material. He dreamed of the night they fought off the Demogorgon, except in his dreams it all went wrong and Nancy and Steve ended up getting torn apart, and he had to stand there and watch, knowing it was all because of him, that they were there because of him and so they were dying because of him.

“I still dream about Barb,” Nancy confessed.

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “I felt safe last night, with you. He did, too. I just wanted to say thank you for that.”

 

 

 

They had saved Will and closed the gate; Nancy had gotten some justice for Barbara. Jonathan had gotten the girl.

It was strange to realize that, despite everything, a part of Jonathan had still believed in happily ever afters.

He hadn’t really thought about the after, not in any concrete way. He wouldn’t have imagined this: lying awake late at night until Will started screaming in his sleep; the dark circles under Nancy’s eyes when he met her at school every morning; her despondency when he kissed her hello sometimes; the way Steve seemed to almost disappear into himself; the way Jonathan’s eyes still couldn’t help tracking him.

That whole year, Jonathan hadn’t been able to look away from the both of them, in the hallways, during lunch hour. They’d looked so happy, so in love. They’d kissed with their mouths smiling.

He hadn’t taken any picture of them since—since that first time. At first it was as penance, but somewhere along the way it had turned into self-preservation. Photographs told you things about their photographers, too, and Jonathan wasn’t ready to deal with what another photo of Steve and Nancy would tell him.

He still knew the way to Steve’s house, even though he hadn’t been in over a year.

Steve answered the door, his face still a mess. Had he looked that bad after their fight last year? Jonathan didn’t think so, but he hardly had the moral high ground there. He’d only stopped because they had dragged him away from Steve.

Had his parents come back? Did he have anyone to take care of him?

Steve raked his eyes over Jonathan like he was looking for wounds, or a big Monster Emergency in Progress sign.

“Everything alright?”

“Oh, yeah.”

They stared at each other awkwardly.

“What did you want, then?” Steve asked, a little tense now.

Jonathan was suddenly reminded of Steve coming over to his house the year before to apologize about being a dick, and warn Jonathan off Nancy, or so Jonathan had thought at the time. Maybe he had been a bit quick to draw conclusions. Maybe Steve had come to him feeling the exact same way Jonathan was feeling now.

“Just—I just wanted to talk.”

“Oh, that’s just great,” Steve muttered to himself. To Jonathan: “You have my blessing, or whatever.”

“What?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here? You and Nancy? I told you, you have my blessing. Now go away.”

“Well, I don’t want your blessing,” retorted Jonathan, piqued.

Steve threw him an incredulous look.

“Don’t you love her?” Jonathan found himself insisting for some reason. “Don’t you want to fight for her?”

“I’m trying to keep down the number of times I get my ass handed to me to once a year, if it’s all the same to you. Apply again next year.”

Jonathan huffed. “Can’t you take anything seriously, for once in your life? You know that’s why she dumped you, right?”

“I rather thought she dumped me for you, actually,” Steve snapped at him.

“Well, maybe she wouldn’t have if you could actually emote like a human being.”

“Oh, sure, because you really strike me as the guy who’s in touch with his feelings.”

Jonathan _was_ generally in touch with his feelings. Sure, he didn’t dive too deep into his relationship with his deadbeat dad, and sure, whatever miasma of emotions Steve’s general existence provoked in him was, in his opinion, better left unexamined, but he did alright. He didn’t always _share_ his thoughts and feelings, but at least he knew what they were.

“Look, are we just gonna keep arguing on my doorstep?”

He looked at Steve, bruised and wary, and yearned fiercely for that morning after they had closed the gate, that short moment before he had woken up properly—how he had felt warm and drowsy, easy with the knowledge that everyone he cared about in this world was close-by and safe—how simple it had all suddenly seemed—how right it had felt for those precious seconds that Steve should be here in the bed with them—

But they had woken up, eventually.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said, tired. “You tell me.”

Steve made an inarticulate noise and threw the door open, turning back on his heels without waiting for Jonathan. At least he didn’t lead them to his room; Jonathan didn’t think he could have gone there even with a gun to his head. Steve went instead for the living room, throwing himself in an armchair and making a grand sweeping gesture that Jonathan interpreted as permission to sit wherever he liked. Jonathan eyed the only actual option, a pristine white couch, vaguely worried he had rolled in the mud recently or lounged in a puddle of paint and forgotten about it.

“Well?” Steve said. Jonathan made sure to roll his eyes at him before going to sit on the edge of the couch.

“What’s up with you avoiding everyone at school?”

“Haven’t you heard? King Steve is dead, long live King Billy,” Steve drawled, and tipped his head back. Jonathan tried to focus on how overdramatic and annoying he was, rather than on the bared line of his throat.

“Come on, it’s not like you don’t have any friends.” He hesitated briefly, but after all, this was what he was here for, wasn’t it? “I actually like you, sort of, you dick,” he told Steve. “And Nancy likes you. And it’s been—really rough, for her, you know, lately. She needs you around, and I’m pretty sure you need her, too.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t get why you’re trying to pull this self-sacrificing lone wolf bullshit, anyway, it doesn’t suit you.”

“Oh, don’t give me that shit,” Steve said, sitting up straight. “You pulled a complete disappearing act the minute you got your brother back last year. I’m the one who dealt with her nightmares. I’m the one who went to see Barb’s parents with her. I’m the one who stuck around. Where were _you_ when we—” Steve clamped his mouth shut.

Jonathan had known coming here it wouldn’t be easy. They weren’t friends. They’d never really tried, had they? It was easy to trust Steve with his life, with Nancy’s. It was incredibly hard to trust him with all the vulnerable parts of Jonathan that he usually shelved deep inside and never let out.

But someone had to take the first step and Steve had taken it, when he'd confessed his fears to them, even though it couldn’t have been easy. It was Jonathan’s turn.

“I didn’t think you’d want me around,” he said.

“Because you were into my girlfriend, or because you beat me up?

“Either. Both.”

“I don’t know,” Steve said, throwing him an oblique glance, “I tend to feel pretty close to a guy after we hunt monsters together.”

“Yeah?” Jonathan asked, feeling something flutter inside his chest.

Steve smiled. “Yeah.”

 

 

 

The Hollands moved away after the funeral. Nancy and Marsha Holland packed Barbara’s room together. Nancy had promised to herself she wasn’t going to cry before she came over, but she knew when Marsha opened Barb’s door that she would.

It was still just as it had been the last time Nancy was here.

Marsha cleared her throat. “I haven’t… Robert came and dusted a bit this morning, opened the window, but I couldn’t—”

“You don’t have to do this, Mrs. Holland. I can do it,” Nancy offered.

Marsha looked blankly around the room. “No,” she said, shaking her head, “it’s alright.”

It was all here, a year later: one of Nancy’s sweaters carelessly discarded on the floor, an empty glass on the nightstand, a record left in the record player; there were notes on Barb’s desk for a chemistry test that she had never taken.

They packed away records, school books and novels, clothes to be given or thrown away, all Barb’s little trinkets. Marsha insisted Nancy keep Barb's favorite jacket, and most of her books.

Under her pillow they found Mr. Cuddles, Barb’s old teddy bear. He had lost an eye sometime when they were six or seven, and he’d had to be resewn a couple of times. It was an ugly, lumpy little thing, and they wept over it until Mr. Holland came looking for them and wept too. Barb's parents held onto each other and Nancy held onto Mr. Cuddles and thought of Barbara, cold and alone in the ground, forever sixteen.

She cried again when it was time to say goodbye. It had felt like a piece of Barb was still here, with her parents, in that room no one went in, like she might still return at any moment and take back her place, but now that piece of her was gone. She was dead all over again.

“Don’t forget to call, honey, alright?” Marsha told her, and Nancy promised she wouldn’t.

Jonathan was waiting for her by the car. He cupped her face and brushed her tears away, awkward but so painfully tender. Steve had been awkward too, when she had broken down in tears after dinner with the Hollands the first few times, but he had always come with her, just like Jonathan had come with her now.

She felt heartbroken all over again, over Barb, over Steve, even over Jonathan, for that year he had spent mostly at a distance, for all the years before that when she hadn’t yet known she would love him.

She wanted to go and see that Will was alive and safe, and Mike, and Jane and all their friends. They hadn’t saved Barb but they’d protected the kids. That had to count for something.

She ached for Steve, for the tender way he would kiss her forehead and hold her safe in his arms, and how for a few minutes she could pretend everything was alright. But she had given up on that, hadn’t she?

“Can we—the kids are at your place, aren’t they?” she asked Jonathan. “Can we go there?”

“Of course,” he said immediately, and only hesitated after he had turned the key in the ignition. He threw a look at her, bit his lips and then said, carefully, “Steve, Steve is probably there.”

“Oh,” she said. She had known that he still hang around with the kids sometimes, but she hadn’t thought of him doing so at Joyce’s house. Did Jonathan see him? Did they talk?

“Is it alright?” he checked.

“It’s fine,” she said before she could think about it.

He nodded and put on her seatbelt for her, then his own.

She could have left it at that, but she didn’t want to make the same mistakes she had made with Steve. She didn’t want to keep it all inside and pretend it wasn’t there anymore. “It’s good,” she said, looking down at her hands, her chipped fingernails. She’d always bitten her nails, but never until blood before this year. “I’d be really glad to see him. He really helped me last year, after. He’d come with me here every time.”

One of Jonathan’s hands inched into her vision and gently slid into hers.

“I’m glad he could help you,” he said. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help, too.”

“You’re here now,” she said.

The kids were sat around the Byers’ table, playing their nerdy board game. She kissed Mike’s head, which he submitted to with bad grace, and ruffled Will’s hair. He looked faintly bemused but let it happen. He’d gotten used to everyone being a bit affectionate towards him.

Steve was playing with them, too, but he took one look at her and asked for a break.

He drew Jonathan and Nancy to the kitchen, put the kettle on and then opened his arms to her. She went into them without thinking, burying her nose in the crook of his neck and breathing him in. She didn’t think about how uncomfortable the situation might be for Jonathan until Steve cleared his throat and said, “Come on, Byers, group hug, get moving,” voice airy and a bit impatient, though he was tense against her.

Jonathan came and wrapped his arms around her and around Steve, too, and Steve relaxed into the hug.

Nancy closed her eyes and leaned into them. She felt like she had that morning they had woken up with their feet tangled, like it was only right that she would love them both. Like that love was the only thing in the world that made sense.

And it was.

 

 

 

Hopper and Jonathan's mom had come to a compromise about Jane. They had agreed it wasn’t safe for her to be seen outside, but that it wasn’t good for her to be completely isolated, either.

Mostly they had agreed that she could hang out at the Byers’ house if Hopper dropped her off and picked her up and there was someone to supervise the kids the whole time, and that the kids could go hang out with her at the cabin, as long as there was someone to supervise the kids the whole time.

Mostly it meant that Steve did a lot of unpaid babysitting.

“Oh, thank God,” Steve Harrington said as he opened the door of the cabin. “I swear I could kiss you.”

And then—before Jonathan had the time to say anything, or even to laugh nervously—Steve grabbed his face and actually planted a loud kiss on him.

Jonathan’s brain froze. It appeared to be a contagious condition: Steve took half a step back and then stopped moving as well. He was still holding on to Jonathan’s face.

Nancy had once kissed him on that exact same spot, at the corner of his mouth, Jonathan was pretty sure. It was a bit after they had brought Will home, but some time before she’d gotten back with Steve. She had greeted him with a kiss on the cheek a few times before that, but that time she had mostly gotten the corner of his mouth, and Jonathan had spent the rest of the day wondering if it meant anything.

“You spend three hours with those little monsters on a sugar high and then try not to kiss the first person who comes to save you,” Steve defended himself, voice high. He belatedly let go of Jonathan’s face.

Jonathan blinked at him, then decided to reply to the safest part of that. “Oh, I’m not here to save you, I’m just here to pick up Will,” he delivered with a certain amount of vindictive satisfaction. “You’re gonna have to manage the rest of them on your own.”

“What? No.” Steve vigorously shook his head. “You can’t leave me here. I’ll pay you. I’ll give you a new camera. I’ll give you a new _car_. I’ll give you anything.”

“I don’t know if I really want anything,” Jonathan said, trying not to think of everything he wished he could ask for. “I’ve already got your girlfriend.”

“I can’t possibly express how glad I am we’re at a stage where we can joke about that now,” Steve said without missing a beat.

Jonathan laughed, and pushed past him to go get Will. “I didn’t even kiss you on the mouth!” Steve called after him.

 

 

 

Steve went away with his mom during winter break. He left a phone number with Nancy, but she only let herself call once, and tried to hang up after a few minutes.

“I don’t want to bother you,” she told him, twisting the telephone cord around her fingers.

“Please,” he said, laughing, the sound of it so warm even over the phone. “Dustin’s already called me twice today. Do me a favor and keep the line busy, you don’t even have to talk to me.”

“I do—I did love you,” Nancy blurted out, helpless to keep the words in.

“Nance…”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Not now, when I’m—I should have said it then, when you asked me. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?” he asked after a while. He wasn’t laughing anymore.

“I miss Barb so much,” she told him, trying to explain. It always came back to that. Barb was dead and Nancy wasn’t. “It’s like there’s this black hole inside me, and it just swallows up everything. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I just—I don’t feel anything at all. I don’t feel sad or happy or angry or anything at all. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was such a mess, I’m sorry about those things I said at that party, I’m sorry I was such a shitty girlfriend.”

“You’re not. You weren’t.”

She wiped at her eyes. “Well, you weren’t a shitty boyfriend, either.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t deal very well with the whole supernatural thing. I’m sorry I made you feel like you were going through all of it alone.”

She wished they’d had this conversation a month ago, that they had apologized and forgiven each other and grown stronger for it. Would they still be together now?

But she was with Jonathan now. She loved Jonathan.

She always seemed to forget it was an either-or situation.

 

 

 

She’d been off all night, distracted. He’d caught her doing the same math problem twice in a row.

“It’s stupid,” she started to confess, with that stubborn set to her jaw like she was disappointed in herself for not being rational at all times.

“So what if it is? I’ve said many stupid things to you.”

She twisted her pen in her hands. “I miss Steve,” she said.

“It’s not stupid,” he said carefully. “I kinda like having him around, too. But he'll be back soon.”

Nancy shook her head. “I miss him when he’s around, too.”

A part of Jonathan had expected this. It made sense. He and Nancy, they’d only ever worked when the world was about to end, hadn’t they? It made sense that when the dust settled, she’d remember who she really wanted to be with.

He saw how good Steve was with Dustin and all the kids, even Jane and Max who didn’t seem to like anyone, even Will who was so skittish with new people. He would be such a good father, would make a kid so happy someday. The kind of father and husband who’d always be there.

Maybe Nancy liked Jonathan for now, maybe she even loved him, but Jonathan wasn’t the kind of guy you’d dream of building a life with. There had always been some kind of invisible veil between him and other people that he couldn’t cross, that he didn’t really _want_ to cross, truth be told. Only when he had seen Nancy and Steve together around the pool that day had he wanted—

“Say something,” Nancy told him.

“What do you want me to say?”

“That you’re not angry.”

“I’m not angry.” He wasn’t, really. He wouldn’t pick himself, either, given a choice.

“That you don’t want to break up with me.”

Jonathan felt like he’d been braced for a punch from the right, only to get slapped from the left. “I thought that’s what you were doing.”

“No.”

“What do you want, Nancy?” he asked. “You’ve just got to tell me what you want.”

She didn’t answer.

He looked down at his hands, at the scar on his palm, a match to hers. They had cut open their palms together, had bled together.

“Sometimes,” he said, feeling numb, “sometimes I think you just miss Barbara so much you don’t care which one of us you’re with as long as you’re not alone.”

She watched him, her lips a thin white line. He was already sorry for having said it, but did that count for anything?

“Well,” she said, nostrils flaring, “sometimes I think you only ever wanted to be with me because that’s as close as you’ll ever get to being with Steve.”

He walked out of his room and out of the house and all the way to his car before he stopped and put his head in his hands.

His parents had been pretty good about not fighting in front of the kids, or they had up until the end anyway. They had waited until they were at school or in bed to argue, but Jonathan had always known. Will had, too.

Jonathan didn’t want to be like this. He didn’t want to be the kind of person who’d poke and prod at someone’s sore spots to cover up his own hurts.

He didn’t want to be the kind of person who walked out, either.

Nancy was waiting by the door.

“This is your house,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“If anyone should walk out of here, it should be me.”

“You don’t have to.” She stared back at him, still angry. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She crumpled, and let him draw her into a hug. “I miss her,” she said against his shoulder. “She was my best friend, and she’s dead, and it just hurts all the time, and I don’t know what to do.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s like I don’t even know what I’m feeling, if I can’t talk about it with her first.”

Jonathan didn’t know how to help her. He couldn’t tell her it would go away, eventually: he still missed his father, and he’d never even had one, not really. He couldn’t make it better. He could only be there for her.

It had been the two of them against the world before, and they had won. They could get through this.

Nancy drew back, after a while. She dried her eyes and cleared her throat.

“Am I supposed to say I do want to be with Steve, now?” he asked, voice light enough that she could take it as a joke if she wanted to.

But Nancy had never backed away from anything in her life. She wasn’t about to let him, either. “I don’t know,” she said evenly. “Do you?”

 

 

 

Even if Nancy hadn’t seen this coming, the furious whispers and thumping sounds coming from the car would have clued her in.

“Stop _squishing_ me,” Lucas’s voice was saying. She opened the trunk of the car to find Dustin, Mike and Lucas squeezed together inside.

“Shit, look what you’ve done now,” Mike said, and tried to shove Lucas, only they were all pressed so close together to fit inside he couldn’t move an inch.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Nancy told them, “and if I find Will crushed to death under the three of you—”

“He wouldn’t come along,” Dustin said, sulky. “He took one look at the trunk and bailed, that faithless deserter.”

“How were you even planning to get out of here?” she asked, grabbing a skinny leg and yanking until Mike came out.

Now they had a little room to move, Lucas was able to extricate himself on his own. “Mike was gonna radio El to come and get us out,” he explained, coming down.

“What?” Mike said, frowning. “I thought you had the walkie.”

“What? Why would I have the walkie? We _said_ —”

She should have left them in there to asphyxiate, Nancy reflected regretfully.

“Out, out,” she snapped, helping Dustin down and then slamming down the trunk. “I’m going to be late picking up Max.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Lucas said, throwing himself in front of the car door. “You have to let us come with you.”

“Hopper never has to know!” Mike said.

“I think he would notice three extra kids when he comes home from his shift.”

“That’s why we needed Will,” Dustin muttered. “Nobody yells at Will.”

“Look,” Lucas said. He faltered briefly. “I think Max really wants to be friends with El, you know? I don’t think she’s ever really had a girl friend before, and El—well, she lived in a lab. She needs like, _all_ the friends. But they haven’t really—hit it off. El’s been a bit weird about her since she came back. But I’m sure if we could just help them along a little bit—”

“It’d be good, for El, too, right?” Mike added, expression pleading. “That’s what Mrs. Byers told Hopper so Max would sleep over. That girls need other girls around? I don’t want her to have no one to talk to if there’s stuff she doesn’t want to tell us about.”

Nancy and Mike had been close when they were younger; she had used to play _Dungeons & Dragons_ with the four of them. But she had grown up first, and suddenly they had seemed impossibly stuck in childhood to her.

It was strange to think now they were growing up, too.

“I’m on it, alright?” she told them, softer now. “But they’re never going to figure out how to deal with each other if you’re always around acting as a buffer.”

They looked at each other, deliberating between themselves.

“Alright,” said Dustin eventually, “we’re trusting you on this. Now if you could open the trunk again, I didn’t have time to grab all the snacks—”

 

 

 

Jane and Max acted like two cats suddenly dumped into a shared territory—both wary and unsure of their footing, not outright hostile but still circling around each other, ready to attack at the slightest offense. They barely said two words to each other the first hour, but they complied easily when Nancy told Max to go show her skateboarding moves to Jane while she figured out what Hopper had left them for dinner, and seemed to have unbent a little as they sat down to eat. They even struck up a conversation all on their own about a television program they both watched while they helped Nancy with the dishes.

Max went off to change into her night clothes, and came back with a brush and hair ties to sit on the couch. “I have to braid my hair before bed or it’ll get all tangled in the night,” she explained when Jane threw her a curious look.

“Okay,” Jane said, and watched Max work tangles out of her hair for a minute before she asked tentatively, “Can I brush your hair?”

Max hesitated a second. She threw a look at Nancy, who pretended to be engrossed in her book, then handed Jane the brush.

Jane brushed Max’s hair gently, copying the way Max had done it exactly. “I’ve never had long hair,” she said. “Papa always shaved it off before it could really grow. It’s very pretty.”

“You can grow it out, if you want,” Max said awkwardly. “Or not.”

“It might be nice.”

Barb’s hair had been long, too, when she was younger than Jane and Max were now. Nancy had brushed it for her so many times, sitting on Nancy’s bed or Barbara’s and talking about everything under the sun. They had talked through every big decision they’d ever made sitting together on one of their beds.

Nancy wished she could lie down in her bed now and hear Barb talk about whatever book she was reading, or whatever fight she was having with her parents. She wished she could talk to Barb about Steve and Jonathan, about whatever it was that drew the three of them together—about where the three of them might be headed. She didn’t know if Barb would understand. She didn’t know if Barb would have been supportive. Nancy liked to think she would have been, but she didn’t really know. She never would.

She had to live with that.

“Come on, girls,” she said once Jane had finished braiding Max’s hair, Max coaching her through it. “Go brush your teeth and then Jane can show you to her room. You can talk or read for a bit if you want, but lights out in half an hour, alright?”

Jane looked startled. “I don’t think she should sleep in my room,” she said urgently.

Max drew herself up stiffly. “I don’t _want_ to sleep in your room,” she bit out. She grabbed her toothbrush from her bag and rushed off into the bathroom, Jane looking after her.

“You don't have to share your room if you don't want to, but that wasn’t very polite,” Nancy said diplomatically.

“No, it’s just,” Jane started, trailing off helplessly. She looked down. “I have bad dreams sometimes, and I make things move in my sleep. I don't want to hurt her.”

Oh. “She can sleep here with me, if you think there's a risk.”

“I don’t want to hurt her,” she repeated.

“She thinks you don't want to be her friend.”

Jane looked conflicted. “I don't not,” she said eventually. “She's cool. She said she could teach me how to skateboard.”

“You should tell her about your nightmares.”

“They don’t always make me break things,” Jane said, defensively. “Just sometimes.”

“It’s alright. It’s not your fault. Do you—want to talk about them?”

Jane shrugged.

“What are they about?”

“Depends.” The brush that Max had abandoned on the couch started shaking slightly, though it stopped when Jane threw it an annoyed glance. “Sometimes I dream that Papa will come take me back,” she said.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Jane shrugged again. “Might not be.”

“We’ll kick his ass, if he comes,” Max said, standing by the bathroom’s door.

Jane stared at her. “Yes,” she said, eyes shining brightly. “We’ll kick his ass.” She considered Max for a moment longer, then seemed to come to a decision. “Do you want to fly?” she offered brusquely. “I can do that if you want.”

“No telekinesis on other people,” Nancy intervened. “That's like, the first of Hopper's rules.”

Max and Jane looked at her with big, wide eyes, but Nancy was wise to their tricks.

“It looks really cool,” Jane said.

“Oh, alright,” Nancy capitulated. “Just this once.”

 

 

 

Steve actually liked kids. He was the only guy among the Harrington cousins, so they’d been ganging up on him and dumping the younger kids on him at family things since he was old enough to hold a baby. It was marginally better than what they had used to do before that, which was gang up on him and dress him up in their clothes to then take a ton of photographic evidence.

So Steve was fine with kids. He was used to them, though the children he got saddled with weren’t usually old or bold enough to illegally drive his car and kidnap his unconscious body to go throw themselves into mortal peril. They didn’t generally have parents who taught them how to tell if someone was following him and what to do if he did spot a governmental tail, either, but Steve was adaptable.

“See anything suspicious on the way here?” Steve checked with Mike and Nancy after they’d done the correct knock and he’d opened the door. (There was a whole protocol on what to do if someone _didn’t_ do the right secret knock, which involved a secret tunnel, a quick evacuation of the cabin, and explosives, but Steve mostly tried not to think about that.)

“An owl followed us for a bit,” Mike reported, “but we made sure to lose it on the way here.”

“Was it a suspicious owl?” Steve asked after a pause.

Mike shrugged. “You never know.”

“Fair enough. Take off your shoes before you get mud everywhere and Hopper dumps my body in the lake. You staying?” he directed at Nancy. “There’s hot chocolate and they can’t make us do their bidding if we band together.”

She smiled at him. “Sorry, my mom’s got me running errands for her today.”

“My loss, then.” He waited until Mike had disappeared into the cabin. “Hey, is everything alright with Jonathan?”

“Yeah,” she said, perhaps a touch guarded. “Why?”

Steve shifted on his feet. “I don’t know, he’s just been acting a bit weird, recently. It’s probably nothing. Right? It’s totally nothing.”

“Yeah. Yeah, totally.” She looked down at her feet. “I just need to know, do you—Are you—” She looked back up, expression resolute. “Do you still—”

“Nancy, come on,” Steve interrupted her.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not trying to get back with you, Steve Harrington, you can stop panicking. I’m just asking if you still—if you still feel—” She couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.

He was the one to look down this time. “That’s not really fair, is it?”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course, I do still.” He caught movement from the corner of his eye and stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind him. It was freezing outside, but he didn’t think this would take long.

Nancy had this faraway look on her face that used to show up when Steve was trying to romance her and she was thinking about her answers on the geometry test. She shook herself off and scowled at him. “And you’ve got some nerve talking to me about fair, anyway. Always putting me in the middle of the two of you. Always making me choose.”

“Well, I didn’t have much of a choice, did I? I only had a shot with you.” He’d meant it as a joke, but the words came out bitter.

Nancy threw him a sharp look.

“Did you want a shot with him?”

“Come on, Nance,” he tried, “it was a joke.” He rubbed his hands together and stuck them in his pockets to try and keep them warm.

She considered him at length. “There was this lady,” she said at last, “at the police station, after Jonathan got arrested last year for getting into a fight with you. She said to me… She thought the fight was about me. But it wasn’t about me at all, was it? Jonathan didn’t punch you because of me. He only lost it because you were saying all those things about him and his family.”

“What are you getting at, Nance?”

“Why did you say those things?

She already knew why. He had been angry, and hurt, and lashing out—

“The very first thing you said, you called him—”

“I know what I called him,” he snapped. “What do you want me to say, Nancy? I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry about all of it. Can’t you let it go?”

She ignored him. “That lady at the station, she said something about how only love makes you act like that.” Steve could barely breathe. “Why did you say those things, Steve?”

She already knew why.

Jonathan had hit him, and hit him, and Steve had felt cracked open. He hadn’t wanted Tommy to get in between them. He hadn’t wanted the cops to pull Jonathan off him. He had wanted to keep it all to himself—Jonathan’s attention, Jonathan’s weight on him, Jonathan’s hands on him… Even the pain had been welcome, because he had deserved it, and because Jonathan was the one giving it to him.

He had felt so sick of himself afterwards, replaying his every interaction with Jonathan, every jibe, every shove, and finally seeing them for what they were.

Steve didn’t want to be like that, someone who would hurt Nancy and Jonathan because they didn’t want him back. He had tried not to be, since.

“It’s alright,” Nancy told him, gently, as he struggled to speak. She could afford to be kind, now that she had the answer she had wanted.

“I need to get back inside,” Steve managed to say. His hands and face felt frozen.

“Alright,” Nancy agreed, watching him carefully. She smiled and said, “Don’t let them eat too much sugar this time.”

“They’re like thirteen or something,” he defended himself. “I really thought they could handle their own sugar intake.”

More fool you, Nancy’s expression said clearly.

He went back into the house. The kids were all waiting patiently in their seats, like they hadn’t moved the whole time. He poured himself a cup of hot chocolate and wrapped his hands around it to warm himself. He breathed in, out.

“Alright, little monsters,” he said as he sat back down. “How much of that did you hear?”

“We couldn’t hear anything after you went outside,” Dustin complained. Max’s strategic cough didn’t quite cover the sound of someone’s shin getting kicked. “Shit!” Dustin swore. “I mean, hear what?”

That was that, at least.

“Nothing important,” Steve said, and sipped his hot chocolate.

“Oh, come on! Did you kiss?” Dustin wanted to know.

“What? No kissing in, around, under or in sight of this house, it's in Hopper's rules.”

“Are you going to murder Jonathan to get rid of the competition?” El asked, wide-eyed.

“Don’t listen to her,” Lucas advised him, “she’s learned everything she knows about human behavior from creepy scientists and soap operas.” That certainly explained some things. “Though maybe you should consider it,” Lucas went on thoughtfully. “It’s not like you’re gonna go anywhere with what you’re doing.”

“He’s not _trying_ to get anywhere,” Will defended him, a touching show of confidence, at least until he added, looking up at Steve uncertainly, “Right?”

“He better not be,” Mike said darkly.

“Didn’t you all have homework you needed to do?” Steve said. “I clearly remember Hopper saying I had to make you do all your homework or he was gonna—” He snapped his fingers. “What was he gonna to do?”

“Feed your body to the crows,” El provided helpfully.

“Yes,” Steve said. “That.”

“I can give you tips,” Lucas offered, ignoring him completely. “I’m really proficient and stuff romance-wise.”

“He’s not really,” Max interjected.

“I can definitely do better than _I do still_ ,” Lucas said, unbothered.

Even Mike condescended to give Steve a pitying look.

“Come on, guys,” Dustin said, “a member of our party needs our help!”

“I really don’t.”

“Steve. You spend all your time with us. It’s sad.”

“Not _all_ my time,” Steve protested feebly. Steve did plenty of other things. Mostly those other things were lying in bed listening to the mixtape Jonathan had made him and despairing over how he was going to die alone and unloved, but still.

He straightened in his seat. Time to bring out the big guns.

“I’m gonna give you two minutes to start your homework.”

Mike gave him the typical _You have no authority over me_ teenage look.

“Or what?” Dustin asked, curious.

“Or I’m gonna tell Hopper you tried to get the girls to play spin the bottle,” Steve revealed triumphantly.

The boys had their schoolbooks open with one minute thirty to spare. El watched them hurry about the room with the same mild interest she showed for animal documentaries, then obligingly got up to go get her own work. Max grabbed her hand and held her back, raising her eyebrows at Steve.

Steve crossed his arm, sure of his imminent victory. “Or maybe I’ll tell Mrs. Byers you tried to get _Will_ to play spin the bottle.”

They had done all their homework and had managed to agree on and actually watch a whole movie by the time Steve gathered up everyone but El to get them all home.

Max was first to be dropped off.

Billy Hargrove’s car was parked a bit farther off the street.

“Hey.” He nudged Max, who had won the passenger seat by kicking everyone in the shin to make way. She grabbed her skateboard and tilted her head up to look at him. “Has he been bothering you any?” he asked.

“Nah,” she said. “Not since we kicked his ass.”

“Well,” Steve said, “I think that was mostly you.”

She grinned back at him. “Yeah. Mostly me.”

“Don’t worry, Papa Bear,” Dustin said, popping his head up above the seats. “We’ll come straight to you if anyone’s mean to us at school.”

“Yeah, you better,” he grumbled, looking away to hide a smile. “And what are you doing, get back in your seat, what have I told you about keeping your seatbelts on in the car?”

Max turned around to squeeze Lucas's outstretched hand and then got out of the car. Will was giggling at Dustin's overdramatic attempts at putting his seatbelt on.

The kids were going to be alright.

Whatever happened with Jonathan and Nancy, Steve thought he was going to be alright, too.

 

 

 

Steve was sitting outside the dark room when Jonathan got there.

“Class got cancelled,” he told Jonathan, getting up. “Mind if I hang out?”

“It’s fine,” Jonathan said. They hang out now. The three of them ate lunch together when they could, and they’d had a couple of study sessions. They’d watched a movie together at Steve’s. Jonathan had played some of his favorite songs for them on Sunday, when they had spent the whole afternoon holed up in his room. It _was_ fine. Jonathan wasn’t completely freaking out about any of it.

“Come on,” he said when Steve still hesitated at the door. “Close the door behind you.”

Steve had more questions about the whole process than Jonathan could answer, but he was good company. Jonathan never struggled through the usual indignities of social interaction with Steve, who easily kept up an endless stream of chattering and didn’t seem bothered if Jonathan didn’t contribute much to it. Steve seemed to like him as he was-often awkward, occasionally tongue-tied, and generally socially inept.

“You haven’t got any pictures of Nancy?” Steve asked as he looked through the prints.

“Not really,” Jonathan admitted after a pause. He had a couple old ones somewhere, taken long before they’d ever really talked to each other, but he hadn’t taken any in the last year and a half, not even after they had gotten together.

“What? Why not?” Steve frowned. “I didn’t—traumatize you, or anything, did I?”

“No,” Jonathan said, though maybe he shouldn’t have. How else could he explain it? Jonathan had saved hundreds of images of Nancy in his mind, moments when she had looked particularly beautiful or angry or happy, moments she had been steely-eyed with determination, moments she had been lost in thoughts, but he’d never actually taken his camera and tried to capture any of them. At first it had been because he had feared what the camera would show about her; then because he’d feared what it would show about him. He couldn’t tell any of that to Steve, the very secret they’d both been trying to hide. “I just don’t have any,” he told him eventually, but something in his face or voice must have clued Steve in that there was something there that Jonathan didn’t want to talk to him about, because Steve, who’d been looming over Jonathan’s shoulder the whole time, physically drew back.

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said. “I don’t mean to shut you out.”

“It’s fine,” Steve waved away. “Don’t sweat it.”

But it wasn’t fine. And it was futile, anyway, wasn’t it, to try to hold Steve at a distance when he was already under Jonathan’s skin?

“Hey,” Jonathan said, and tugged at Steve’s sleeve to pull him back. Steve resisted for a second then let himself be led back, and sat on the chair next to Jonathan, their knees knocking together. “Look,” Jonathan said, struggling with his words. “I don’t really—get people. I never have. When I get behind my camera, it’s easier. You know? Even if I don’t get it right away, I can keep the moment right there and figure it out later. That’s why—And I’m not trying to say that as an excuse or anything, I know what I did wasn’t okay, but that’s why I took those pictures of you and Nancy. It wasn’t to—I just wanted to understand.”

“What we were doing?” Steve asked.

It was in this room, waiting for a photograph to turn their world upside down, that Nancy and Jonathan had started to trust each other.

Jonathan already trusted Steve, in a fundamental way he once hadn’t believed he could feel towards anyone outside of his family. He trusted Steve to fight for and with him. He trusted Steve to do the right thing when push came to shove.

It was harder to trust that Steve wouldn’t turn away from him. It was harder to trust that Steve wouldn’t leave.

But maybe he owed it to the both of them, and to Nancy, too, to try.

“What I was feeling,” Jonathan answered.

Steve inhaled sharply, his eyes fixed on Jonathan’s face.

“I couldn’t figure out why I was so—why I couldn’t stop noticing you. It wasn’t—I didn’t want to be you, or anything. It wasn’t envy.” He searched for the next words, but he couldn’t find them. There had been so many steps between what Jonathan had felt in his chest when he had looked at Steve from far away, and what Jonathan felt now, when he looked at Steve and _knew_ him, knew the heart and bones of him. Jonathan didn’t know how to put any of it into words.

“I envied _you_ ,” Steve said after a while, seeing him struggle.

Jonathan huffed. “Oh yeah, I’m sure.”

“No, I did!” Steve insisted. “Since we were kids, you’ve always given off this vibe you didn’t give a damn about any of it. Like you didn’t care if people liked you, if you fit in. I envied that so much.” Steve smiled ruefully. “It’s kinda funny, really, that anyone ever thought I was one of the cool kids. I’ve never been cool about anything in my life. I’ve always been scared that people will see straight through me eventually, and they’ll see that—that there’s nothing there. But you—you and Nancy, you make me feel like—like you already see me, and you like what you see.”

“We do,” Jonathan said roughly.

“Yeah?” Steve asked.

Jonathan let himself reach out and brush his knuckles against Steve's knee. “Yeah,” he said.

 

 

 

“We should go,” Jonathan said.

It was long past midnight. They’d gone out to catch a movie, but none of them had wanted to say goodbye once it was over, so she’d sneaked them in her room through the window. They had lain down on her bed and talked for hours, careful to speak quietly so as not to wake up the house. Steve had been intermittently yawning for the past hour.

Nancy still didn’t want to say goodbye.

“Stay,” she said.

Jonathan and Steve undressed her together, peeling off her sweater slowly, helping her step out of her skirt, carefully rolling her tights down her legs. They helped her into her night dress, cautious of her ears as they pulled it over her head, smoothing the fabric down. She rifled through her drawers for something she might give them to sleep in, and only found some stretched-out sweatpants, the fabric worn and faded. Jonathan eyed Steve’s hips, narrower than his own, and left him the sweatpants.

“I’ll just sleep in my clothes,” he said, but Steve rolled his eyes and went to him. His hands shook as they unzipped Jonathan’s jeans, but he kept his eyes steady on him all the while. Jonathan’s breaths came quick and shallow as Steve and Nancy tugged his jeans down his hips and down his legs, as they lifted one leg then the other to take them off entirely.

Nancy unbuttoned Steve’s pants and drew them down his legs, and Jonathan took his shirt off, ran his hands down Steve’s bare arms. Nancy supported him as he stepped into the sweatpants and Jonathan pulled them over his legs.

She didn’t want to ever let go of them.

Nancy drew back the covers and got into the bed. They climbed in after her, on either side of her. It was a tight fit, but she didn’t mind cuddling up to Steve, half lying on his chest, and she didn’t mind Jonathan pressed up against her back, his arm wrapping around them both. She didn’t mind at all. She was glad that tonight at least she could hold onto them and know they were safe. So many times she had dreamed of them getting hurt or dying.

Lately the nightmares had grown less fantastical. Monstrous cries and claws and teeth were still a regular feature of her dreams, but now they were joined by human shadows and human voices. She dreamed of the Byers disappeared. She dreamed of Steve and Jonathan tied down with electrodes strapped to their heads. _Tell us what you know_ , they asked Jonathan. _Where is the girl_ , they asked Steve.

Nancy didn’t want to live scared.

“I don’t think it’s over,” she said. It was easier to admit in the dark. Steve had had the right of it. “I think whoever was behind Hawkins Lab, they’re gonna come back. I don’t think they’re going to leave either the gate or Jane alone.”

“No,” Jonathan exhaled. “I don’t think they are either.”

“We won’t let them take her,” Steve said. “We won’t let them hurt Will again, either.” She felt the arm Jonathan had thrown over them draw back, his hand going to cover Steve’s where it rested on her waist.

Nancy hadn’t been able to save Barbara. She had struggled with the guilt of that for so long. She still did.

It wasn’t enough to make them take responsibility for Barb’s death. It wasn’t enough to shut down the lab.

“I don’t want to wait for them to come back,” she told them. “Jane said her sister was hunting them. I want to look for them, too. I want to make sure they never do any of it again. Are you—” It was only then that her voice faltered. “Are you with me?”

“Hey, come on,” Jonathan said, softly. “You know we’re with you. No matter what, we’re with you.”

Steve leaned his forehead against hers. “We fought monsters together, remember?” He said it as though it meant everything.

It did.

 

 

 


End file.
